Researchers reported at the 2004 American Society of Hypertension Annual Scientific Meeting in New York, that consuming dark chocolate and cocoa improves the function of blood vessels.
In one new study, consumption of cocoa in healthy volunteers, aged 18 to 77, resulted in significantly improved vascular responsiveness. (The measure the researchers used looked at the "stiffness" of blood vessels. In patients whose blood vessels are "stiff," hypertension is common.) The beneficial effect was most pronounced in patients over 50 years of age.
In a second study, after volunteers ate 100 grams of dark chocolate (the sacrifices one performs for science!) vascular responsiveness was again significantly improved.
And in a July, 2005 report in Hypertension, Italian investigators showed that feeding 100 grams of dark chocolate daily to hypertensive patients improved their systolic and diastolic blood pressures - and lowered their LDL cholesterol levels. (Control patients fed white chocolate had no beneficial effects.)
Investigators postulate that it is the flavonoids in chocolate that causes vascular improvement. Dark chocolate contains more flavonoids than lighter chocolate - and adding milk to chocolate (i.e., milk chocolate) inhibits the absorption of flavonoids. So any benefit gained by eating chocolate may be limited to dark chocolate (and cocoa).
Why you shouldn't eat a lot of chocolate based on these findings.
The findings reported this week are interesting, but don't begin eating chocolate like it's candy.
First, flavonoid content varies markedly in chocolate products, so you might not be getting the healthy stuff with that candy bar. (The flavonoid content of the chocolate used in these studies was carefully quantified, but such quantification has not been done for commercial chocolate products. It is likely that chocolate manufacturers will begin reporting on flavonoid content in the future, however.)
And second, along with the flavonoids, chocolate products also deliver lots and lots of calories. 100 grams of dark chocolate, for instance, yields approximately 500 calories, and eating this much chocolate daily without adjusting for the increase in calories will produce a weight gain of about 1 pound per week. So any benefit you might gain by eating chocolate could be completely negated by making yourself obese.
Furthermore - and importantly for those who adhere religiously to one or another mutually-exclusive dietary philosophies - these extra calories are packaged both as fat and as carbohydrates. This means that adding chocolate to your diet will violate both low fat and low carb dietary dogma.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar